FSharp.Charting: Bar and Column Charts

Summary: This example shows how to create bar and column charts in F#.

The input data in this example is an F# list of tuples containing continent names and total populations. The example demonstrates how to display a bar/column chart with names of continents as labels and the populations as the values. A sample bar chart is shown below.

A bar or a column chart can be created using the Chart.Column and Chart.Bar methods.

All methods are overloaded and can be called with various types of parameters. When called with a list containing just Y values, the chart automatically uses the sequence 1, 2, 3… for the X values. Alternatively, it is possible to provide a list containing both X and Y values as a tuple, which gives a way to draw 2D curves and scatter plots as well. Here are three examples:

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// On Mac OSX use FSharp.Charting.Gtk.fsx
#I "packages/FSharp.Charting"
#load "FSharp.Charting.fsx"

open FSharp.Charting
open System

let countryData = 
    [ "Africa", 1033043; 
      "Asia", 4166741; 
      "Europe", 732759; 
      "South America", 588649; 
      "North America", 351659; 
      "Oceania", 35838  ]

1:	`Chart.Bar countryData`

Chart

1:	`Chart.Column countryData`

Chart

1:	`Chart.Bar [ 0 .. 10 ]`

Chart

When using F# Interactive, each of these examples needs to be evaluated separately. This way, F# Interactive invokes a handler that automatically shows the created chart.

The first example specifies the data source as a single list that contains two-element tuples. The first element of the tuple is the X value (category) and the second element is the population.

The second example creates a Column chart instead of a Bar chart.

The third example below shows that you may also simply give a set of Y values, rather than (X,Y) value pairs.